FORCES OF CHANGE
FORCES OF CHANGE
In his obituary of Whitney, Brugmann noted that, unlike so many of his fellow linguists, Whitney had not been satisfied with the collection, dissection, and inspection of historical facts, but had tried to gain insight into the nature of the forces that produce these facts. Three other linguists who shared this ambition were Bréal and—closer to Brugmann— Hermann Paul and Philipp Wegener.
To understand why Brugmann attributed to Whitney a share in the foundation of linguistics as a science of principles, one has to look briefly at Paul’s famous Principien der Sprachgeschichte (1880, 2nd edn 1886, English transl. 1890), sometimes regarded as the bible of the neo-grammarians. Like Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener, Paul contributed to
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the constitution of general linguistics, ‘a science’, he wrote, ‘which occupies itself with the general conditions of existence of the object historically developing, and investigates the nature and operations of the elements which throughout all change remain constant’ (English transl. 1890: xxi; italics in original). He claimed that the ‘historical science of principles has to investigate exactly those points in which the single forces interpenetrate, and to inquire how even the forces most differing in nature, about whose reciprocal relations the exact sciences hardly concern themselves at all, are able to steer to a common goal by means of perpetual reciprocal operation’ (1890: xxiii). Those forces ‘most differing in nature’ are physical and psychological, individual and social.
Paul, like Whitney and Bréal, wanted to unmask the mysteries of language-change, and like them he saw that changes are, on the one hand, undoubtedly initiated by the individual speaker and hisher will to make himherself understood, but that, on the other hand, no speaker has the power to make or change language. As Whitney expressed it: ‘there is no will to alter speech; there is only will to use speech in a way which is new; and the alteration comes of itself as a result’ (LGL: 147). The forces underlying language-change have a Janus-like appearance, and as Paul, like Bréal and Whitney, had not yet found the concept of the ‘invisible hand process’, he tried to circumvent the dilemma by claiming that linguistic variation arises through the individual, but that only certain variations are selected by society, become usage, and change the language. Paul, who like Whitney and Bréal stresses the importance of the individual as the primary agent of change, departs from them in his rejection of any influence of the will, the primary mover in Bréal’s and Whitney’s theory of change. But this is only a shift in emphasis, the underlying conception of language remains the same:
The real reason for the variability of usage is to be sought only in regular linguistic activity. From this all voluntary influence is excluded. No other purpose operates in this, save that which is directed to the immediate need of the moment—the intention of rendering one’s wishes and thoughts intelligible to others. For the rest, purpose plays in the development of language no other part than that assigned to it by Darwin in the development of organic matter—the greater or lesser fitness of the forms which arise is decisive for their survival or disappearance.
The sum of individual variation brings about a shift in usage (cf. 1890:13): ‘The result of this is that all the doctrine of the principles of the history of language centres round the question, what is the relation between linguistic usage and individual linguistic activity?’ (ibid.).
At the time when Paul was writing, it was almost established wisdom that whatever force of change is at work, it is not a natural force, as Max Müller and Schleicher believed. In the neo-grammarian manifesto the speaking subject had been introduced as a force of change. Osthoff and Brugmann had written: ‘that language is not a thing, standing outside and above men and leading its own life, but has its true existence only in the individual, and that therefore all changes in the life of a language can originate only with individual speakers’ (1878: xii). Although the status of the individual speaker in the process of change was far from clear, Paul referred to this factor of change extensively.
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In this new climate of opinion he could thus use Darwinian theorems with much more ease and in a much more inconspicuous way than Whitney, who was writing at the high point of Schleicher’s Darwinistically tinged theory of linguistic evolution. What Paul had in common with Whitney and Bréal, who were still fighting the anti-naturalist fight, was the belief that the forces of change were not natural. But he would not have gone to the extreme of proclaiming that it was the human will and the human mind that determined language-change. In his onslaught against Schleicher Whitney wrote:
If the voluntary action of men has anything to do with making and changing language, then language is so far not a natural organism, but a human product. And if that action is the only force that makes and changes language, then language is not a natural organism at all, or its study a natural science.
(OLS: 301)
Müller received the same treatment with identical arguments. What is at stake for Whitney is the defence of linguistic science itself as an historical or moral science (cf. LSL: 48) against all obscurantism, naturalism and mysticism:
And one or two of the most important subjects treated of—for example, the nature of the forces which are active in producing the changes of language, with the resulting place of linguistics among the sciences, and the origin of language—were handled in an exceedingly scanty, superficial, and unsatisfactory manner.
(OLS: 240–1)
Bréal, too, adopted the will as the principal and primitive force of linguistic change, but more than Whitney he emphasized the importance of the human mind, even conciousness, something which even some of his closest friends, such as Henry, regarded as an over-intellectualization. In a little known text, written in 1887, Bréal stated:
Linguistics has certainly studied the modifications that the grammatical mechanism undergoes; however, it has not tried to find with the same care the intellectual causes through which the mechanism modifies and renews itself. It feared no doubt that it would go astray if it tried to discover the principles that are hidden for direct investigation. But without this type of research our science is incomplete. The languages would somehow be deprived of their primary motor.
Bréal, like Whitney, rejected Schleicher’s conception of language as an organism that grows according to internal laws, but he also argued against the directly related issue that languages decay, and even more so the postulate that modern languages are no more than pale shadows, the decadent offspring of a perfect ‘Ursprache’. As early as 1867 he told his students in one of his lectures on comparative grammar:
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The principal lesson one can learn from these works [e.g. Curtius] is that our languages are not, as one could think from reading Pott or Benfey, fragments of a once harmonious whole broken into pieces. Each of our languages has emerged from a primitive unity according to organic laws whose influence we can describe and whose principle we can discover. The attention of our first masters was too much distracted by the multitude of objects and prevented them from listening to the hidden forces (my emphasis) which determine the form and decide about the fate of languages. Just as over and above the global laws that govern a whole realm of nature more particular laws determine the development of the classes, giving way themselves to the variety of genera and species, the splitting of the mother-language into so many particular languages and dialects is not the product of a blind shattering, but of a long and regular evolution.
(1868a:84–5)
Just as natural science has to find the hidden forces that structure biological evolution, linguistics has to find the forces that drive linguistic evolution, ‘with that difference, that the forces we talk about are the faculties of human beings and can be found in ourselves’ (HM:190).
If forces structure change, so to speak, what are the laws that govern language-change,
a term used by Whitney and Bréal as often as the term force? Although neither Whitney nor Bréal always employ a fine separation of causes, forces, laws, etc., one might say that causes are mostly external, historical influences, but also confused sometimes with forces; forces are the internal drives of human beings, and laws are certain regular patterns, regularities, or tendencies that are observable and classifiable as results of the constant labour of internal forces and external influences (cf. Bréal ES: 11f.11f.; Whitney LSL: 95). Unlike the forces of change, which are broadly speaking operating in the same way in all languages, laws of change are more language-specific (cf. Bréal 1868a:78). In relation to phonetic laws, Whitney wrote: ‘every language has its own peculiar history of phonetic development, its own special laws of mutation’ (LSL:95).